The must-see exhibitions in and around Milan this winter

With UR-RA – Unity of Religions – Responsibility of Art, a deep dialogue between art and spirituality opens at the Royal Palace of Monza through the vision of Michelangelo Pistoletto, curated by Francesco Monico. The exhibition, scheduled from November 1, 2025, to October 31, 2026, presents an immersive journey conceived specifically for the evocative spaces of the villa designed by architect Giuseppe Piermarini: from the first canvases of 1957 to the master's most recent works, focusing on the theme of spirituality, up to the new Third Paradise in the Royal Gardens. With Michelangelo Pistoletto and members of the ancient traditions of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this exhibition project brings up the question of what form the sacred can take in art today. If art was once a spiritual act, it now becomes a space for mediation and listening, where differences coexist without confusion. In this sense, Pistoletto's concept of “preventive peace” is the condition for imagining a shared future.

In the exhibition A Manual for Solitude, at the Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio in Milan from October 29, 2025, to January 30, 2026, Greek photographer Yannis Bournias transforms solitude into an aesthetic experience and mental space. Inspired by John Cage's piece In a Landscape, the project builds a visual journey made up of suspended images and interrupted silences, where the seeming quietness hides a constant tension. In Bournias' photographs, suspended cities and interiors inhabited by isolated presences are places for exploring the vulnerabilities of the body and the fragility of the gaze. With a visual style that evokes the disturbing atmospheres of David Lynch, Bournias investigates the boundary between documentation and fiction, restoring a physical and spatial dimension to solitude.

In the deconsecrated church of San Carlo in Cremona, Massimo Bartolini presents 100 Days, an installation that reflects on the tension between light and darkness, the collective and the individual. At the entrance, a large unlit Sicilian luminaire creates a suspended architecture, made up of modular geometries that evoke the absent celebration: light becomes matter and memory, the celebration is frozen between expectation and end. In the apse, a red neon light illuminates two phrases taken from graffiti in the Pizzighettone prison, giving voice to the anonymous and intimacy to the sacred space. The work is structured as a double threshold: on one side, the collective light is denied, on the other, the individual word is illuminated. In this balance between vision and imagination, Bartolini transforms the deconsecrated church into a place of silent resonance, where absence becomes presence and light, even when extinguished, continues to tell its story.

With Balloons & Wonders, Jeff Koons arrives in Fiorenzuola d’Arda with an international event curated by Luca Bravo and promoted by Deodato Arte and the Municipality of Fiorenzuola. The exhibition, scheduled to run until April 6, 2026, offers an immersive journey through the most iconic works of the master of neo-pop art: from the famous Balloon Dog, Balloon Rabbit, and Balloon Swan to the Gazing Ball and Antiquity series, in dialogue with classical tradition. Koons, an artist of records, transforms mundane objects into icons of desire and mirrors of contemporary society. As Bravo points out, “Koons neither consoles nor denounces, but reflects us”: our culture of consumption and narcissism is mirrored in his shiny surfaces.

MASI Lugano dedicates the exhibition Prampolini / Burri. Della materia to the dialogue between two protagonists of 20th-century Italian art, Enrico Prampolini and Alberto Burri, curated by Marco Scotini. The exhibition, which spans over fifty years of experimental work, explores the role of matter as language and thought: from Prampolini's constructive dynamism and biomorphic abstractions to Burri's poetics of combustion and cretti. The exhibition highlights an unexpected continuity between Futurist utopia and post-war reflection, restoring matter as a threshold between energy and form, destruction and regeneration. Historical works, archival documents, and installations interact in an exhibition that highlights the tension between research and spirituality at the heart of their artistic vision.

At the GAMeC in Bergamo, from October 4, 2025, to January 18, 2026, the exhibition Atelier dell'Errore – TEN traces over ten years of activities by the collective founded by Luca Santiago Mora, which began as a visual arts workshop for neurodivergent children and is now an internationally recognized artistic reality. The exhibition, divided between Spazio Zero and the museum's galleries, presents paintings, drawings, videos, and installations that embody the group's two guiding principles: Animals and Errors. The creatures of AdE – hybrid, polymorphic, in constant metamorphosis – transform error into language and imagination into shared territory. Among the main themes is the new series Unknown Pleasures, dedicated to the topic of sexuality.

Platea – Palazzo Galeano in Lodi presents Chez moi, a solo exhibition by Vashish Soobah (Catania, 1994), curated by Gabriella Rebello Kolandra, and the fourth chapter of the Nine Out Of Ten Movie Stars Make Me Cry program. The exhibition brings together a new video made in Mauritius in 2025 and a site-specific installation designed for the Platea space. Starting from a family story, Soobah reflects on the meaning of home as an emotional and changing place, marked by diasporic memories and hybrid identities. Food, and pizza in particular, becomes a symbol of cultural contamination and a tool for talking about belonging and transformation. In dialogue with previous exhibitions in the program, Chez moi expands Platea's collective narrative, transforming it into a meeting place for cultures, languages, and biographies.

From October 31, 2025, to April 6, 2026, the Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin presents Alice Neel. I Am the Century, the first Italian retrospective dedicated to the great American painter Alice Neel (1900–1984), curated by Sarah Cosulich and Pietro Rigolo. The exhibition traces over seven decades of activity, restoring Neel's figure as a chronicler of the human soul and witness of her time. Through more than six thematic sections, the exhibition explores her radical view of life, politics, and relationships, in a web of intimacy, vulnerability, and social consciousness. With her direct and vibrant pictorial language, Neel redefined 20th-century portraiture, anticipating issues of gender and identity that are still central today. Produced in collaboration with the Alice Neel Archive, the exhibition is accompanied by a publication that explores her visionary humanism.

Born from a collaboration between OGR Turin and Tate Modern, Electric Dreams. Art and Technology Before the Internet explores the origins and transformations of electronic art from the post-World War II period to the dawn of the digital age. Curated by Val Ravaglia and Samuele Piazza, the exhibition spans forty years of experimentation in which artists have worked with cutting-edge media and hybrid practices to expand their creative horizons, translating light, sound, algorithms, and cybernetics into new forms of expression and relationship. From the innovations of the Zero group and Arte Programmata to the first digital works and DIY electronic movements of the 1980s, a collective narrative emerges in which technology becomes a poetic language and a tool for emancipation, anticipating the concept of continuous connection that would shape Internet culture.

In the run-up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, gres art 671 opens the winter season with the exhibition FUORIPISTA, curated by 2050+ with gres art 671, which explores the link between art and winter sports. Through a variety of paintings, photographs, videos, and installations, this group narrative dives deep into the mountains, showing them as dynamic places of experimentation and change, impacted by tech innovations, social transformation, and the ongoing climate crisis. In a dialogue between past and present, the exhibition brings together works by Pieter Bruegel, Andreas Gursky, Carlo Mollino, Laura Millard, Randa Kherba, Ludwig Berger, Walter Niedermayr, Kari Medig, Giovanni Betti, and Katharina Fleck. For this occasion, gres art 671 has also commissioned three new projects by Masbedo, Studio Numechi, and Studio Folder.